I. Introduction
Publication of research results in scholarly journals
plays an important role in the scientific community. These publications
provide both a means for dissemination of new results and a means for evaluating
the quality of scientific work and the scientists who perform it.
This paper will examine motivations for publishing, ethical issues in publication,
some relevant ethical codes, and some corrective measures which have been
taken to shore up areas of ethical concern. Finally, the impact of
new communications technologies on the future of publication will be considered.
Let us begin with some definitions. The term
"publishing" in this paper will be restricted to the publishing of papers
which appear in peer reviewed scholarly journals. Upon submission
of a paper to such a journal, an editor selects one or more active researchers
with expertise in the area of the submission to act as peer reviewers.
These volunteer reviewers read through the submission and comment on both
content and style, making an overall recommendation regarding the paper:
publish as is, publish with modifications, or do not publish. Based
on the recommendations of the reviewers, the editor decides whether or
not to publish the paper.
Although the publication process is a time-consuming
and drawn out affair, there are numerous motivations for publishing.
Perhaps the most altruistic motivation is to provide a scientific record
of your research so that others might benefit from it. Ideally, published
results should provide new insights to others working in the same field
and thus help avoid the problem of their having to "reinvent the wheel."
A second motivation for publishing is nearly as
altruistic. Opening your research to the scrutiny of others provides
a means of validation of your research results. Not only is your
paper examined by one or more referees prior to publication, but also the
paper will (one would hope) be read by numerous other individuals.
When a significant problem is found with a paper, the authors often hear
about it through direct communication, through discussions at scientific
conferences, or through the "Comment" section in the journal. The
more scrutiny your research can successfully withstand, the more confidence
you have in the validity of any conclusions you have drawn.
These important scientific motivations for publishing
notwithstanding, there are often job-related pressures to publish.
A solid publication record is generally required to get and maintain in
good standing an academic job at most universities. By publishing
a paper, you can establish "priority" for a discovery, that is evidence
that you observed a particular phenomenon first. Establishing priority
in turn demonstrates your contributions to the field, bolstering your application
for academic promotion and tenure and for research grants. There may also
be institutional (both academic and nonacademic) pressures applied to publish
based on institutional desires to boast of a strong publication record
and to establish priority in discoveries.
In summary, the publication process is used as
a means of dissemination of results, validation of results, and measurement
of scientific productivity. Thus ethical standards associated with
the publication process ought to reflect these goals.
II. Ethical Concerns
Marcel LaFollette1 describes a
number of types of unethical conduct associated with scientific publishing.
The following is taken verbatim from her Table 1 on page 42:
Types of Unethical Conduct or Misrepresentation in Scientific
and Technical Publishing
By authors:
-Describing data or artifacts that do not exist.
-Describing documents or objects that have been forged.
-Misrepresenting real data, or deliberately distorting
evidence or data.
-Presenting anotherís ideas or text without attribution
(plagiarism), including deliberate violation of copyright.
-Misrepresenting authorship by omitting an author.
-Misrepresenting authorship by including a non-contributing
author.
-Misrepresenting publication status.
By referees:
-Misrepresenting facts or lying in review.
-Unreasonably delaying review in order to achieve personal
gain.
-Stealing ideas or text from a manuscript under review.
By editors or editorial advisors or staff:
-Forging or fabricating a refereeís report.
-Lying to an author about the review process.
-Stealing ideas or text from a manuscript under review.
I would add to this list at least three other concerns.
The first is submitting a paper to be published for the sole purpose of
expanding your publication list. There are several ways to do this.
A single paper can be split into two or more papers and published as a
series. Another option is to publish essentially the same results
with just minor modifications in a different journal. (Note that
there may be legitimate reasons for doing this if, for instance, your motivation
is to reach different audiences.) In any case, journal (and library)
space is wasted, not to mention the time of those involved in reviewing
the paper, all for the intent of creating a false picture of the extent
and significance of your research.
A second concern is intentionally publishing incomplete
papers for the purposes of obtaining or maintaining leadership in a field.
This situation may arise in two ways. In the first case, a groundbreaking
result may be rushed into print before all of the appropriate checks and
confirmations have been made, with the intent of establishing priority
for a discovery. In the second case, key steps in experimental procedure
may be deliberately left out of a paper to make it more difficult for competing
scientists to catch up.
A final area of concern is a referee disclosing
to someone else an idea found in a paper under review. This is closely
related to stealing an idea from a paper under review, but it broadens
the concept beyond the personal use by the referee.
III. Ethical Standards
Having identified some areas of potential concern,
we will now look at what the existing standards are (at least those which
are in writing). The American Physical Society in 1991 adopted a
code for professional responsibility. The complete text is available
on the APS web site (aps.org). The relevant portions read as follows:
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution and interpretation of the research study. All those who have made significant contributions should be offered the opportunity to be listed as authors. Other individuals who have contributed to the study should be acknowledged, but not be identified as authors. The sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.
Plagiarism constitutes unethical scientific behavior and is never acceptable. Proper acknowledgment of the work of others used in a research project must always be given. Further, it is the obligation of each author to provide prompt retractions or correction of errors in published works.
Peer Review
Peer review provides advice concerning research proposals, the publication of research results and career advancement of colleagues. It is an essential component of the scientific process.
Peer review can serve its intended function only if the members of the scientific community are prepared to provide thorough, fair and objective evaluations based on requisite expertise. Although peer review can be difficult and time-consuming, scientists have an obligation to participate in the process.
Privileged information or ideas that are obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not be used for competitive gain.
Reviewers should disclose conflicts of interest resulting from direct competitive, collaborative, or other relationships with any of the authors, and avoid cases in which such conflicts preclude an objective evaluation.
There is additional information in the APS code
regarding faking data, but that might be better classified under the heading
of general research standards as opposed to standards specifically involving
publication. Overall, the range of issues covered by the APS code
and by LaFollette are fairly similar as far as authors are concerned.
The APS code goes into somewhat more detail than LaFollette's table in
the area of referees' responsibilities, including the statement that physicists
have an obligation to participate in the process. Finally, the APS
code is silent on issues associated with editors, perhaps because editors
involve such a small portion of the physics community.
Included in the instructions to authors in Physical
Review Letters (1996) is the following:
The journal declines publication of papers which appear to parcel research results into fragments for multiple publication.
We hold the authors responsible for demonstrating adequate awareness of published prior research and for proper acknowledgment of colleagues. We invite the referees' comments on these issues, but we do not hold the referees responsible for deficiencies, nor does the journal accept responsibility for them.
Physical Review Letters, then, addresses the issue of padding a publication list by splitting papers. They also remind the authors that they, not the referees, are ultimately responsible for what appears in their paper, specifically regarding acknowledging related work.
IV. Areas of Concern
We now turn our attention to some problem areas
related to publication. Of major concern to libraries and individuals
who both pay for and store journals is the rapid rise in the volume of
material published, resulting in higher subscription costs and greater
shelf space requirements. This rise is reflected both in the increasing
number of journals produced as well as larger size volumes of existing
journals. To illustrate the latter, consider Physical Review Letters.
Published weekly, in 1970 an average issue was about 60 pages long.
By 1980, the average had risen to about 80 pages and in 1990 is was up
to nearly 130 pages. In the second half of 1995, the average topped
180 pages per issue. This is an overwhelming amount of information,
and it represents just the tip of the iceberg since Physical Review Letters
is one of the most selective journals and it has a four page limit for
its articles.
With this explosion in information comes the problem
of keeping up to date. A generally accepted requirement of publication
is acknowledging those who have gone before you, people who have performed
similar research. Searching the literature for related publications
is becoming a larger task as the publication volume rises. Fortunately,
the recent development of electronic databases has made searching somewhat
easier, but it is not foolproof. A literature search based on certain
key words and perhaps on some well known authors in a given field may locate
a large number of relevant references, but there is no guarantee that it
will find all of the references. Thus while it is important to seek
out and acknowledge the work of others in the field, it is not clear what
constitutes an "honest effort" in searching for these contributions.
A related area of concern is erratum citation.
If authors realize there is a significant error in a published paper, they
may correct their paper by submitting a short correction notice called
an "erratum" to the same journal. The erratum may follow the original
paper by a few months or even a few years (in extreme cases). The
problem arises when one reads a paper which is a year or more old and one
does not realize that an erratum has been published. The original
error, though corrected, may continue to propagate. A literature
search geared for an erratum will easily turn it up, but it appears that
such searches are not being made. For instance, a study of 14 papers
in Physical Review Letters which were corrected with errata showed that
when subsequent papers cited one of the original ones, the corresponding
erratum was cited less than 40% of the time. Corrected Physical Review
B papers fared even worse, with the erratum being cited less than 5% of
the time2 . Accuracy in the printed record is important,
especially to those who are just beginning to build up from existing work
done by someone else. Hence it is important that errors in the printed
record be corrected as they are discovered. Those who make the effort
by publishing an erratum should be applauded for their effort. However,
it is less than satisfying to note how rarely these errata seem to be considered
in conjunction with the original papers.
The errata considered in the previous studies were
all associated with errors of significance, that is errors which had an
impact upon one or more results or conclusions in the paper. Some
of those errors resulted from "honest" mistakes, mistakes competent and
diligent physicists make from time to time and embarrassingly happen to
reach print. Some of those mistakes, however, were likely better
characterized as due to carelessness. These mistakes are the ones
which should be caught by routine checks and reviews prior to publication.
Distinguishing between these two is difficult at best and cannot always
be done with any accuracy except by the originator of the mistake.
Regardless of the source of the error, the error itself can have a measurable
negative impact on the scientific community as it propagates or as time
is lost by other parties needing to redo the research to correct the error.
It may be argued then that one has an ethical obligation to avoid publishing
work with careless errors. In proposing this as an ethical obligation,
it should be noted that it is not necessarily enforceable since the line
between a careless error and an honest mistake is not always clear.
Enforceability, however, should not be a requirement for an ethical standard.
It would appear, based primarily on anecdotal evidence,
that standards for publication lists have risen over the years. That
is, to be a "competitive" scientist requires more publications now than
used to be the case. Couple that with the tight job market for academic
physicists and it is easy to understand the pressure to publish papers.
One could ask whether this increased pressure to publish has led to more
careless errors in literature. That careless errors exist is easy
to demonstrate; however it is not clear if the problem is any worse now
than it has been in the past.
Plagiarism, an issue addressed explicitly by the
APS code, does exist in physics but blatant examples seem to be rare3
. As with any discipline, one runs across the difficulty of deciding
when the line has been crossed from using broadly accepted descriptions
or ways of looking at things to stealing someone else's creative ideas.
Problems with referees seem to come up from time
to time, but most of the evidence seems anecdotal. One hears stories,
for instance, from people who are convinced that a referee has a grudge
against them and for that reason is slowing up the review of their paper.
Perhaps the best indirect evidence for problems with the refereeing system
comes from the breakthrough in high temperature superconductivity.
When Paul Chu and his coworkers submitted their breakthrough paper to Physical
Review Letters4 on high temperature superconductivity,
the chemical formula for the new superconductor contained "Yb", the abbreviation
for ytterbium. When the paper was published, the chemical formula
had been corrected to replace "Yb" with "Y" (yttrium). While Chu
denies that the use of Yb in the original manuscript was intentional, others
speculate that he intentionally used an incorrect chemical formula out
of concern over the possibility that details of the chemical formula might
leak out during the refereeing process.5 Regardless
of whether or not Chu's action was intentional, some in the research community
have said they would not blame Chu if he did intentionally alter the formula,
indicating presumably that they too have concerns about confidentiality
during the refereeing procedure.
Authorship in scientific papers has a different
meaning than in other literature. One becomes an author of a scientific
paper by, in principle, making a significant scientific contribution to
the research reported. In a project involving a collaboration among
several people, only one or two may be involved with the actual writing,
with the remaining authors acting more like editors. "Honorary authorship",
the practice of putting a senior lab member's name on a paper even if no
scientific contribution was involved, is probably less prevalent in physics
than in other sciences. It is worth noting that honorary authorship
can be risky -- if one has not followed the research closely enough, one
does not know what the quality of work is to which one is lending one's
name and reputation.
V. Corrective Measures
Among steps that have been taken to try to alleviate
some of these problems is the effort by organizations such as the National
Science Foundation to curb pressures for extensive publication lists.
When submitting a grant application to NSF, individuals submit publication
lists of at most ten papers (at most five directly related to the application
and five not directly related). Some universities have gone to similar
systems in evaluating candidates for vacancies or for tenure. This
approach certainly reduces the incentive to extend one's publication list
by subdividing papers or exchanging honorary authorships with lab members.
One of the problems in evaluating someone's publication
record is that it is often difficult to assess the impact the published
papers have had without being an expert in the field. This is why
some evaluators have taken the easy way out by resorting to counting publications.
Another numerical approach to assessing impact is by looking at the citation
records. One asks the question: for a given paper, how many times
has this paper been cited in other articles. The more citations then,
presumably, the more impact the paper has had. Such a count is relatively
easily done using a tool such as The Science Citation Index. However,
it is not clear that this is really a genuine measure of the importance
of a paper. It is also a system which rewards people for citing their
own paper since excluding self-citations from a citation count is (presently)
much more time-consuming.
One problem associated with the publication explosion
is that libraries are running out of storage space for the journals.
Paradoxically, some libraries are finding this problem resolved since journals
are beginning to price themselves out of the market. As university
libraries face subscription prices rising faster than their budgets, more
subscriptions are being canceled.
David Mermin6 has suggested that
the journal explosion problem can be dealt with by boycotting some of the
more obscure journals. Boycotting would entail refusing to submit
papers to these journals, refusing to participate in the editing or refereeing
process for the journals, and discouraging libraries from subscribing to
them. The underlying assumption is that most of these obscure journals
do not really add any new useful information outlets for the scientific
community but rather just provide another mode for extending one's publication
list. However, the criteria for deciding which journals deserve to
be boycotted are not clear.
VI. The Electronic Future
The changing face of communications, in particular
the move away from the printed word towards electronic communication, will
surely have an impact on the publication process. Physical Review
Letters is already distributed electronically (on-line and on CD ROM) as
well as in traditional printed formats. There is the potential for
a great savings of space and some savings in production costs as publishing
moves in this direction. Furthermore, on-line versions of journals
allow for Errata and Comments to be linked directly to the original article,
making it easier for the reader to locate all the relevant information.
Mermin7 has suggested that it
might be worthwhile to move towards an entirely electronic publishing system,
with most of the papers being unrefereed. This would eliminate most
publication costs. Quality control, however, would be based on reputation
and commentary attached to the papers.
Finally, it is worth noting that electronic databases
of preprints have been in operation for several years. These databases
make available via the internet papers which have been submitted but not
yet accepted for publication. By doing so, they make available to
all interested parties the most recent developments in their field, albeit
in an unrefereed format. One can view this as a step towards a more
democratic system as in the past such preprints were available primarily
to a mailing list consisting typically of those people with whom the author
has had previous contact.
VII. Conclusion
Some have suggested that the publication system
in science is outdated and deserves to be scrapped. The argument
goes that most of the up-to-date and important information is already adequately
disseminated through conference talks and preprints of papers distributed
prior to publication. However, until there is universal access to
conferences and preprints, the printed record remains the most reliable
way for someone breaking into a field or someone working at a smaller university
to learn about existing work. The publication record also remains
the best way to find out what has happened several years back, information
which is no longer discussed at conferences or in preprints but may become
relevant for newly discovered problems. Finally, the scrutiny at
least some work receives pre- and post-publication can provide an effective
means for screening and validating research. The nature of such a
validation process is much less clear for preprints and preprint databases.
For all of these reasons, the publication process, flawed as it may be,
is worth preserving.
Notes:
1.LaFollette, Marcel C. Stealing Into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing. University of California Press (1992).
2. M. Thomsen and D. Resnik. "The Effectiveness of the Erratum in Avoiding Error Propagation in Physics." Science and Engineering Ethics 1 231 (1995).
3. For a reference to a documented case, see Phys Rev B 39 9614 (1989).
4. P. H. For, et. al. "Superconductivity at 93 K in a New Mixed-Phase Y-Ba-Cu-O Compound System at Ambient Pressure." Physical Review Letters 58 908 (1987).
5."Yb or Not Yb? That Is the Question" Science 236 663 (May 8, 1987).
6. Mermin, N. David. "What's Wrong With This Library?" in Boojums All the Way Through. Cambridge University Press 1990.
7. Mermin, N. David. "Publishing in Computopia". Physics
Today 44 no. 5 p. 9 (1991).